I need a new stick. It is not much about the price, but the usability/reliability/longevity/transfer speed. It is a Buffalo USB 2, Japanese model, either 8GB, either 16GB. What do you think? I would tend to select the 16 GB.
30 MB/s data transfert / 8 GB / 4000 JPY
or
30 MB/s data transfer / 16GB / 7500 JPY
http://buffalo.jp/products/catalog/flash/ruf2-lvs-bk/ (30 MB/s)
Q1: is the life span of a USB shorter than a HD?
Q2: does the size make any difference about reliability or longevity?
Q3: what's the data transfer of 30 MB/s - labeled on the box - vs the USB speed of 480 MB/s?
Q4: Is it a good practice and does it increase reliability to change the FAT file system to NTFS on a 16 GB USB? - I would definitely do it on a USB HDD with correct NTFS permissions set.
http://buffalo.jp/products/catalog/flash/ruf2-rvs-sv/ (38 MB/s)
Q5: for double price - ouch! - see the link above - there is the same USB with 38 MB/s data speed. Is it worthy (read the question as: does the speed increase that much)?
Thanks for your advice.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on Twitter
Numbers first. Google says ¥4000 = $40.72 and ¥7500 = $76.34. That is insane. I paid about $30 for my 16GB flash drive, and it's a Corsair. Generally, you don't beat Corsairs, but if those drives you are looking at can do the speed they say, well, they'll beat my current and last Corsair - the last one was a 4GB model I got for $12 shipped. But that's America; if you're overseas somewhere, I guess you may have to pay higher prices. Still, see if Newegg.com will ship to you. Air mail can't be that much. I bought a paperback from Amazon.co.uk that was £4.99 and paid about $25. So look into that.
You only need 16GB if you're getting into video. A 4GB drive can hold a ton of apps, and some video. 8GB should be fine. With 16GB you can carry a few movies at full DVD quality, maybe a couple Blu-Rays in Matroska format.
As for your numbered questions:
1. Not sure on life vs. hard drives. Having no moving parts and something called wear leveling that spreads the data across the surface tends to indicate they last longer. Corsair likes to claim that you can boil or freeze their drives, and once they're dried out completely, they work good as new. You can't say that about a hard drive. Also, you can't get a hard drive wet.
2. The size shouldn't, no; however larger drives tend to have slower access times. If they both list the same speed, maybe it doesn't matter for those.
3. 480Mb/s is the speed of the USB 2.0 protocol. And remember that is megabits per second, not megabytes per second. There are 8 bits in a byte, so that is really only 60MB/s. If the drive is listed at 30Mb (3.75MB) that is what it will do. Now, if you go and stick it in a USB 1.1 port, with a bandwidth of 12MB/s (1.5MB/s) it will do that. In the former case, your flash drive is the bottleneck; in the latter, it's the port.
4. No clue.
5. Well, I'm already appalled at the prices you're talking about paying. 30Mb/s is very good if the device can actually deliver it. 38Mb/s would certainly be faster (still under the 480Mb/s limit, so you'd get all 38), coming in at 4.75MB/s. You might value that extra speed if you're moving big movies around.
>Q1: is the life span of a USB shorter than a HD?
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Thanks to both of you for your answers, I will make good use of the information. That's correct I live overseas. FIY you can't purchase electronics overseas with a local credit card. It is a commercial agreement among country blocks to protect their market. It is a problem when you are expatriate and you need a notebook or OS in your native language.
@NathanJ79
I have little CPU power at disposal to do audio conversion in batch. Since my music collection is lossless (Mainly FLAC), I guess 16 GB could be the solution if I want to take some music on the go. I am pondering the trade off between copying/deleting big files vs. a lossy compression (so in the end 2 files: lossless/lossy for a same album). Wave Pack could be the solution, but it would imply re-encoding everything with this codec.
@Otto
1500 insertions should be achieve within 2 years (I expect 4 years of use). Can I use another connector on the top of the USB's default - to extent its life? I have seen very short USB wire extender (about 5-10 cm. long). what do you think? There should be not lose of speed.
NTFS and any other journaling file systems write much more to the medial then standard FAT/FAT32 systems. Any write action does in fact produce the feared wear of the cells, so NTFS and similar systems (journaling systems of Linux for example) are not favorable for use on flash memories.
I will keep FAT system file on the USB.
To have access rights on a portable media is rather problematic.
Correct, but not if you set the proper NTFS permission on the formatted drive. Access: Everybody, Owner: Everybody. it does defeat the purpose of security, but NTFS increases stability on large volume, e.g. an external fix USB Drive Station. Not to mention a better cluster size management and the ability to preserve the metadata of the files. FAT is better on the perspective of compatibility, but it very old. Imagine a 32k cluster on a 250 GB FAT partition for mix data content. What a loss.
>Correct, but not if you set the proper NTFS permission on the formatted drive. Access: Everybody, Owner: Everybody. it does defeat the purpose of security, but NTFS increases stability on large volume, e.g. an external fix USB Drive Station. Not to mention a better cluster size management and the ability to preserve the metadata of the files. FAT is better on the perspective of compatibility, but it very old. Imagine a 32k cluster on a 250 GB FAT partition for mix data content. What a loss.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Thanks Otto, it makes sens. Does your information worth for the new steady state disks for notebooks? Would you recommend such disk vs. a tradition 2.5 HD (I will have to change notebook soon)
PS: is it realistic to extend my USB connector's life by adding a short USB wire extension?
Anyway, I just purchased the Buffalo USB 16 G, it is pretty large/long compared to my 4 years old USB stick (500 MB). I will install my portable apps anytime soon. The USB is packed with some software in Japanese I have no use. I will format it using the XP formatting tool in FAT32
Additional question:
Does fragmentation affect USB sticks in the same manner as it does on traditional disks?
Do not defragment a flash drive as it will significantly decrease the life of the drive. Just what I've heard.
I was going to suggest a portable hard drive since you insist on porting FLACs around with you everywhere, but with 16GB you should be able to carry a few albums.
> Does your information worth for the new steady state disks for notebooks? Would you recommend such disk vs. a tradition 2.5 HD (I will have to change notebook soon)PS: is it realistic to extend my USB connector's life by adding a short USB wire extension?Additional question:
Does fragmentation affect USB sticks in the same manner as it does on traditional disks?
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
> All you can defrag is the file system of your operating system partition. It has absolutely nothing to do with positioning the data bits on the flash chip. You have no access to the file system of the flash and thus you can not defrag it with what ever
Clear!
Once again thanks to all for your answers *special mention to Otto*. I suffer a disease - there is no treatment. From time to time, when crisis occur, I cannot attend a PC for a period of time ranging from 1 to 2 months. Anyway, I am better now and I am reading/answering all my posts in stand-by. Thanks for your understanding and see you on the board for additional questions.
PS: (another answer) yes, I do have a portable HDD 80 GB Buffalo PHSU2 for the Flac files, but as you said, but a USB with 16GB capacity is much lighter. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.